IntelliJ IDEA 11 RC2: It’s Getting Faster All the Time

We’ve just uploaded IntelliJ IDEA 11 Release Candidate 2 for you to try. Download it now and check the changelist if you are interested.

Also, some numbers for the curious minds.

Last year, just before version 10 release, we had made some benchmarks for IntelliJ IDEA 10 indexing speed. It was good for the size of project we had at the time. But it grows constantly, that’s why we have to return to this subject. Let’s see if IntelliJ IDEA 11 performance fits its own codebase.
Another bottleneck of developer’s productivity is application startup time. We’ve spent some efforts on this, too. Here are the results

Note that the startup time was measured at the first IDE start after switching computer power on. IDE restart time is much shorter, just about 30 seconds.

Startup time is really not interesting. When starting once or twice a day but working for 8 hours it really doesn’t matter whether IDEA starts in 5 or 1 minute. More important is editing/compiling/analyzing times.

I evaluated sometime ago startup time on my project and found it is seriously impacted by gc settings. Default settings are not optimal for modern machines and ~30% of startup + opening project spent on gc. discussion thread is here http://devnet.jetbrains.net/message/5320171